This specification relates to providing search results, and in particular to providing search results based on information indicative of a user's search intent.
Internet search engines provide information about Internet accessible resources (e.g., web pages, images, text documents, and multimedia content) that are responsive to users' queries by returning search results in response to the queries. A search result includes, for example, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and a snippet of information for a resource responsive to a query. The search results can be ranked according to scores assigned to the search results by a scoring function. The scoring function generates the scores for the search results according to various signals, for example, where (and how often) query terms appear in the search results and how common the query terms are in the search results indexed by the search engine.
Often users provide queries that cause a search engine to return results that are not of interest to the users, or do not fully satisfy the users' need for information. Search engines may provide such results for a number of reasons, such as the queries being a poor expression of the information needed. It is thus common for users to refine queries multiple times during search sessions.